Protective layers are often applied to various substances in order to defend and shield the substances from being damaged, scratched, smashed, dented, shattered, destroyed or otherwise adversely affected. Car wax, wood finishing products, sealants, zinc layers (galvanization), and protective polymer films, among others, are examples of protective materials that can be applied on different objects in order to prevent the objects from being damaged. A protective layer is generally selected according to its ability to defend a substance against a certain threat or a specific set of circumstances. For example, certain protective layers are especially formulated to protect a substance from thermal fluctuations while other protective layers may be especially designed to protect against continuous and repeated physical contact with other objects.
In the field of nano-technology, protective layers are especially important not only because of the dimension and structure of the nano-sized components but because nano-sized-devices, such as hard disk drives and integrated circuits, are configured to repeatedly perform the same action (e.g. recording/storing information). For example, when dealing with nano-sized features on an integrated circuit or nano-sized magnetic domains on a hard disk drive, the thickness, density, tribological properties, and reactivity of the protective material greatly affects the functionality of the components of the nano-device.
Conventional protective layers, commonly referred to as carbon overcoats (“COC”), provide increasingly inadequate protection as the size of the features on nano-devices decreases. This inadequacy may be due, in part, to the need for conventional protective layers to be applied thinner across the magnetic medium because the read/write head must be located closer to the magnetic material in order to read the information recorded on and write the information to the smaller magnetic domains/bits. However, when conventional protective layers are not sufficiently thick, the protective layer does not adequately protect the underlying material from corrosion, and does not prevent the formation and build-up of undesired byproducts on the surface of the protective layer, among other negative side effects.